First Fleet graves discovered

PM - Monday, 6 August , 2007 18:43:13

Reporter: Karen Barlow

MARK COLVIN: Sydney's colonial history is being exhumed directly under its Town Hall.

An archaeological dig, associated with a restoration project, has found a First Fleet graveyard containing at least 20 bodies.

Karen Barlow went down into the dig for PM.

KAREN BARLOW: Since its construction in 1869, Sydney's Town Hall has been prominent meeting point for the living, but before then it was a resting place for the dead.

A First Fleet cemetery operated there between 1792 and 1820, which Sydney's Lord Mayor, Clover Moore, says was supposed to be moved out west to make way for the fast growing city.

CLOVER MOORE: The story goes that when the Town Hall was constructed later in 1869 that a contractor was paid to exhume the bodies and they were to be taken to Rookwood, but story has it that perhaps he might have taken the money, but didn't transfer all the bodies.

KAREN BARLOW: The archaeological work is part of a $60-million restoration project announced earlier this year. The work so far has involved lifting up the timber floor of the Town Hall's cavernous basement, which is known as the Peace Hall, then a concrete layer was removed, and now a delicate scrapping of the soil underneath is underway.

Archaeologist Mary Casey says they've confirmed that gentleman, all those years ago, did not do his job.

MARY CASEY: Well we have known from work we've done in the building in 1991 and 2003, that there are definitely remains, grave cuts and things still surviving within… in the ground both inside and outside the building. So yes.

KAREN BARLOW: And what's sort of graveyard is it? It was the first one, what sort of people would be here?

MARY CASEY: You have people who'd arrived on the First Fleet, convicts on the First and Second and Third Fleet, people who were substantial in the development of early Sydney. We know out in Druitt Street was part of the regimental burying ground. So, you'd have a whole range of Sydney society buried here.

CLOVER MOORE: And children too and babies.

MARY CASEY: Yeah, children and babies, you know, there were a lot of early deaths with children. And yes, we'd certainly have family groups would be buried here as well.

KAREN BARLOW: What do we do know about this area of Sydney at that time? Why was it a perfect place for a graveyard and then for the Town Hall?

MARY CASEY: Well what happened is that it's right on the sort of between the main part of the town, which is down towards Circular Quay, and then you have the brick fields down the hill in the Haymarket, and this was sort of at the edge of the main town of Sydney.

If you look at maps from that period, it's sort of out by itself, and it was also a private property and somebody had been buried. Captain Shay (phonetic) had been buried in his property, and it was decided by Governor Phillip that this would be a good place to put the cemetery because it was on the outskirts, but still close enough.

And I think it had been vacant, it looked like a vacant lot when the council was built. It had been abandoned for 40 years; there had been no burials in there. And council saw it as a development site at that period.

KAREN BARLOW: What's going to happen with these remains?

MARY CASEY: Well, we're… there's a lot of consultation yet to still happen with the Heritage Council on those issues. There's been no decisions made at this point.

KAREN BARLOW: Similar excavation work has taken place at other prominent Sydney sites such as the Cross City Tunnel and the GPO. The Lord Mayor says the long unused Peace Hall may become a new venue once the gravesite is sorted out.